A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts
Last edited Mon Jul 20, 2015, 03:13 PM - Edit history (1)
From 2013 but relevant right now.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/a-rising-tide-lifts-all-yachts/279978/
As you can see, the majority of black people live in conditions that very few white people ever experience, and a significant number of black people live in conditions which virtually no white people experience. This has not changed. For the first generation 62 percent of black people, but only 4 percent of white people, lived in neighborhoods where 20 percent or more of the people were poor. In the second generations 66 percent of black people, and 6 percent of white people, lived in such conditions. In both generations a third of all black people lived in neighborhoods where 30 percent of the population was below the poverty line. Only one percent of all white people lived in such situations.
The vast majority of white people live in low poverty neighborhoods. The vast majority of black people live in moderate to high poverty neighborhoods, with the scale tipping toward the high end. Only 10 percent of all African-Americans experience the kind of neighborhood ecology that 61 percent of white people experience. It's interesting that the trend line--even for white neighborhoods--is pointing down. Canaries in the coal mine I guess.
It's important to understand that a direct line from neighborhood poverty to individual poverty can not necessarily be drawn. On the contrary, individual affluent African-Americans tend to live in neighborhoods that are a step below individual affluent whites. [A]lmost half (49 percent) of black children with family income in the top three quintiles lived in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty," writes Sharkey. "Compared to only one percent of white children in those quintiles." The sociologist John Logan found that, over the past two decades, affluent blacks tended to live around more poverty, than poor whites.
So this is not simply a question of "the black poor" or even "the poor." Helping the poor is a noble goal on to itself. But it isn't the same as addressing the effects of a tradition of racist policy. The two are related--much like homophobia and misogyny are related. But just as same-sex marriage and abortion rights are not the same thing, neither is America's toleration of racism, and its toleration of inequality, color regardless.
= new reply since forum marked as read
But it's statistically there. Because of redlining and discrmination ("old style"
and "solidarity" or "giving back to the community" (new style) the trend towards segregation continues. I've heard too many people say they really wanted to get away from diversity and retreat to communities "like myself."
However, poor kids have a lot of indicators that correlate strongly--with decent causality shown, btw--that this is a bad, bad thing for AfAm upward mobility.
What's buried in the Atlantic's charts is that typically wealthier and poorer whites mingled without so many problems. It was a good thing, to be honest, as long as the % of poor whites wasn't too high. Peer pressure really matters, and if most better-off white kids push for good grades, few discipline problems, and taking difficult classes and going to college, that rubs off on the poorer kids. It works the other way, too--esp. when "working class" solidarity gets in the way, or "ethnic solidarity." There were concentrated poor white areas, but by and large since the % of poor whites was lower *and* the population was 80% white, the poor whites were sort of "dissolved" in the mass of less poor whites.
Segregation didn't allow that to happen for blacks, and AfAms got the short end of the economic stick, anyway.
How you define "neighborhoods" matters. In the first time period most whites and most blacks lived in poorly defined neighborhoods. I did. Where, exactly, "my" neighborhood ended wasn't clearly drawn and there were no ethnic, race, gang, or subdivision boundaries. The closest thing to a boundary were roads, one lane each direction. Now my neighborhood is defined by the subdivision, and when I registered my kid for school instead of saying some fuzzy neighborhood I had a clearly defined map. This side of the street is one subdivision, that side--often with a wall--is another.
Now self-segregation matters in two ways. Moreover, wealthier families increasingly live with wealthier families. In larger areas like Atlanta there are, I've seen research pointing out, even a small number of mostly black middle and upper-middle class subdivisions with more on the way. You get less segregation by race than you used to--but now it's by class, which often has exactly the same distribution of people you'd get by race. (A nifty confound. Simple studies just say simply 'race', complicated ones say 'it's complicated.')
Ed studies show that moving low SES kids in with high SES kids is really good for the poor kids and can help--depending what you define "help" to mean--the wealthier kids. (Often "help" includes not grades and learning but judgments about "racial attitudes" and "acceptance" . This is then taken out of context to assume this is true at any level of mixing. Sociology studies show that at 10-15% social trust starts to break down, and ed studies show that classrooms at about that percentage start to change their character in a way that hurts the high-SES kids unless they're somehow segregated in the school. Social trust can start to re-form when the neighborhood is mostly finished tipping, but that depends upon other factors and not just the % of ethnicities; social trust also varies by class and ethnicity in the US.
